


this city is vast and intricate

by postcardmystery



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Blood, F/M, Gore, M/M, Murder, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-16
Updated: 2012-10-16
Packaged: 2017-11-16 10:00:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/538262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/postcardmystery/pseuds/postcardmystery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He pulls a man clean from his carriage, right in front of the Stadtschloss. He curses the name of the Emperor with blood on his teeth and entrails strewn across a carriage door marked by a clean black shield. He calls himself the Anti-Christ. He calls his Dru the Devil’s Daughter.</p><p>Of course they come for him. Of course he’s going to burn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this city is vast and intricate

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings for blood, gore, violence and murder.

Berlin smells like fireworks.

Spike presses his nose into Dru’s hair, but it doesn’t drown it out. Nothing ever drowns it out. Once, there were teeth in his neck, and now he closes his eyes, breathes in sweat and shit and firelight, and he can’t ever block it out.

It’s not quite a curse, even if Angelus calls it one. It’s not quite a lot of things, but he pulls back his lips to snarl in a tongue no man on these streets speaks, and he does not care, he does not care, and he does not care and does not care and does not care—

—but Dru’s right, and something always snaps inside you, after a little while.

 

 

“This can’t last,” says Dru, dawn licking at the horizon and a little boy’s blood on her hands, her shawl trailing in the mud and her hair loose and lovely, just  _begging_  for his fingers twisting in those curls.

“What, love?” says Spike, distracted, slicking back his hair in a shop window that will never show his reflection, no matter how many times he peers into it and rubs at the glass. (But,  _oh_ , old habits die hard. Except for how, in his case, there was  _nothing_  hard about it.)

“Everythin’,” she says, tongue flickering at the gore on her wrist, “can’t you smell the wind, my darlin’ boy?”

“Think one of your boys pissed himself,” Spike says, and she laughs, high and mocking, and he is reminded, for the hundred hundredth time, that his girl, she sees things he’ll never lay eyes upon, no matter how long he lives, no matter how many hearts he drains or churches he burns or long white necks he tears and rips and shreds. 

“Smells like gunpowder,” Dru says, and the fireworks were two weeks ago, too long even for them.

“Whatever you say, pet,” Spike says, and she smiles at him, says, “Smells like  _death_.”

No doubt about it. His girl, she’s one of a kind.

 

 

“You’re beautiful,” he says, shoving his face into her neck, and she taps on his nose with her index finger says, “Daddy’s coming, William. We ‘aven’t got long.”

 

 

He takes her to Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof Berlin, and sits her down on the grave of the Brothers Grimm.

“Want to tell you a story,” he says, and kneels between her legs, his knee pressing into wet soil, “and I know how you like fairy tales, don’t you, Dru?”

“I’m a little girl in a thin white dress,” she says, and he grins against her thigh, says, “You’re a princess about to eat the queen, love. A thing out waitin’ in the dark, but a princess, all the same.”

“Are you my white knight, William?” she says, and he pushes up her skirts, says, as he leaves a messy kiss behind her knee, “Not by half.”

 

 

He takes her in the cathedral they’re still building and fucks her until he can’t see straight. He swaggers down alleyways and and beckons to the dollymops, helps them into carriages that they’re never going to leave. He stalks the slums and burns down rich men’s houses. He thinks about assassinating the Kaiser; decides it’s not worth the hiding Angelus would give him when he finally drags his arse into town.

Berlin’s not his city, but it’s  _a_  city, something of England in the weather and something of London in the smiles people don’t ever give. There’s men in uniform on every street corner and whispers of a man called Marx behind closed doors. (And what do closed doors mean to a vampire but another confidence trick to run?)

Berlin’s not his city, but he steals Dru a doll, wipes the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, does not let himself hurt, remember, make a wish.

 

 

He’s never been very good at understanding that immortality is a position he has to preserve, not wield at will.

He pulls a man clean from his carriage, right in front of the Stadtschloss. He curses the name of the Emperor with blood on his teeth and entrails strewn across a carriage door marked by a clean black shield. He calls himself the Anti-Christ. He calls his Dru the Devil’s Daughter.

Of course they come for him. Of course he’s going to burn.

 

 

He opens his eyes to fingers around his neck. (Not that it’ll kill him. He knows this modus operandi. This is all about the pain.)

“Daddy!” Dru squeals, somewhere behind the whitehot bursts behind Spike’s vision, and Angelus leans in, whispers, “The girl didn’t turn ye for nothin’, lad. Get her killed and I’ll tear yer guts out and eat ‘em in front of you.”

“Like to see you try,” says Spike, and lets his head fall back with a thud that hurts even more than his grandsire’s hands.

“Yer done in Berlin,” says Angelus, scraping a nail into Spike’s skin and loosening his grip all at once.

Spike shrugs. There’s something wrong in Angelus’s eyes. He’s not done in Berlin. He’s never done anywhere. That’s the song in his veins. That’s the poetry behind his eyelids. That’s the whole entire buggerin’  _point_.

 

 

“Don’t be sad, my love,” says Dru, leaning over the rooftop edge, rain in her hair and her arms spread wide, “we’ll come back before it burns.”

“No, we won’t,” says Spike, and his fingers tighten as he mouths a German word he’ll never speak aloud, not even to her, and strikes the match.


End file.
